David Schlenker '13, received SEE-Beyond Award for his upcoming summer internship in India!
David Schlenker, class of 2013, will be heading to New Delhi, India this summer for an 8 week teaching internship. He also recently received the Educational Experience Award (SEE Beyond) that will help fund this endeavor. Below are excerpts from an essay he wrote on the project. Congratulations to David!
The project:
“Based in the Govindpuri slum of New Delhi, the grass-roots NGO Project Why provides free supplementary education to children, with the focus that they will become teachers themselves. To do this, children learn to think critically about their place in society. They pool knowledge from the community, most notably through storytelling, and utilize international funding and pedagogical techniques to build a support system empowering the community from within. In fact, many of the organization’s full-time teachers were former Project Why students, and the project boasts an unprecedented 100% success rate for students passing Grade XII (The American equivalent of high school).”
How the internship came to be:
“I emailed Director and Founder Anou Bakshi to learn more. She immediately responded with the most heartfelt email one could ever hope to receive from a stranger. At that moment, I knew this organization had something to offer me, and I something to offer it.
We worked together to create internship responsibilities compatible with my personal interests and Project Why’s goals, molding a 40 hour/week (280 hours total) summer experience. Drawing from my previous internship experiences, I plan to write articles and reports highlighting the status of the organization as well as advance its social media networks, shedding light on the project’s activities to a wider audience. However, my primary duty, in addition to teaching English grammar and computer proficiency to 13-16 year olds, is to synthesize my studies in Indian history to construct a curriculum to be used by future teachers.”
Education in Action
"Drawing from my previous internship experiences, I plan to write articles and reports highlighting the status of the organization as well as advance its social media networks, shedding light on the project’s activities to a wider audience. However, my primary duty, in addition to teaching English grammar and computer proficiency to 13-16 year olds, is to synthesize my studies in Indian history to construct a curriculum to be used by future teachers.
I am excited to equally learn from and share the knowledge I gained at Skidmore with students who experience a world very different from mine. Studying at Skidmore helps me understand that education has a greater purpose than purely sitting in classrooms. My internship at Project Why will not only have a deep impact on the Govindpuri community I will reside in for two months, but will have a profound impact on my final year of college, and my future after Skidmore.”
